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12 April 1997

FROM TIME to time we have reported on the capricious error messages that
computers are liable to perplex their users with. Here is a new batch, of
varying degrees of unhelpfulness, all provided by bemused readers.

Samuel Penn was alarmed to come across this one in the messages file for
Impression Publisher on RISC OS: “Warning! Stray debugging code detected. This
machine will self-destruct in ten seconds. Awooooga! Awooooga!”

Less alarming, but equally frustrating, was this from Antonis Papanestis’s
Latex2e: “This error message was generated by an \errmessage command, so I can’t
give any explicit help. Pretend that you’re Hercule Poirot: examine all clues,
and deduce the truth by order and method.”

Poirot might have come in equally useful when Chris Pindar sat down in front
of his Power Macintosh, to be confronted with a crashed machine displaying the
following: “An unexpected error occurred because an error of type 28
occurred.”

But sometimes all you need with a computer is a little patience. Michael
Dufour tried to load a small document into Word 6 from the file manager on his
P166 computer. After about ten minutes the following message came up: “This task
is taking longer than expected—do you want to continue?”

At least that makes sense. Which is more than can be said of Internet
Explorer. Several readers have reported that they were told that trying to open
certain sites was impossible because: “The operation was completed
successfully.”

Worse still, though, is a computer that goes into a sulk. Here’s what
Netscape told Bryan Gaensler: “Error 702: File doesn’t feel like it. The
requested file is not in the mood.”

Perhaps Netscape was also sulking when it told Fred Oosterheert: “Cannot
fail-over to using no proxies since your autoconfig URL is locked.” After
clicking “OK”, Oosterheert was flashed the message: “Since your autoconfig URL
has been locally locked we cannot failover to allowing no proxies.”

But what was Netscape thinking of when Justin Doel was trying to get rid of
some old bookmarks and was asked: “Delete all selected items and their
children?”

Come to that, what did Charlie Stross’s Unix file server have in mind when it
told him: “Segmentation error: alien abduction overflow”?

And what was Mark Warren to make of the following message from a Microsoft
package he was installing: “Unable to get configuration information about your
computer because of the following error: more data is available.”

But we are glad to be able to say that not all error messages make you feel
frustrated. Ian Hindmarsh was quite charmed when a PC running Oracle server
connections returned this flowery message the other day: “ORA-25000:TNS:listener
failed to bequeath connection.”

Our favourite, though, is this from Huw Prichard’s Linux operating system.
It’s a message that not only makes sense, but is also entirely friendly: “There
seem to have been a few errors there. In just a moment, I’m going to continue.
Try not to look.”

WHAT were the first words spoken by HAL, the rogue computer in Arthur C.
Clarke’s 2001? An error message, perhaps?

Clarke himself has now told us. He was recently taking part in a panel
discussion via the Internet as part of Cyberfest 97. This was held at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the supposed “birthplace” of
HAL.

Clarke revealed that his preference for HAL’s first words would be: “Good
morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from my hard
drive.”

FEEDBACK was recently in the Netherlands to visit Philips at its home in
Eindhoven, and was given a demonstration of a new videophone and conferencing
system. A black box links a conventional TV set to an ISDN line. The black box
has a camera and microphone so that people at each end of the line can see each
other and talk. A similar system works as an add-on for a conventional personal
computer.

The system gives surprisingly clear colour pictures. And the camera can be
remotely panned and zoomed to look round the room at the other end of the line
and see, for instance, who is talking during a conference. The microphone is
sensitive enough to pick up crisp sound from all round the room.

The demonstration was late starting, and for the first five minutes after the
remote phone number was called there was nothing to see except an empty room.
The occupant had grown tired of waiting and gone off for a coffee. When she
returned, she walked round for a while, only later realising that the camera and
microphone were “live”. Then everyone had a rather stilted conversation.

After a moment’s puzzling, the penny dropped. Whereas ordinary telephones
require the owner to pick up and answer, the new video system is designed to
auto-answer. Philips confirms that unless users remember to switch off this
function, the system automatically answers a call by switching on its camera and
microphone. They will then silently relay what is being said and done in the
distant room, to whoever has called the number with a compatible system.

Big Brother, it would seem, has finally arrived, albeit 13 years late. From
now on, Feedback will be extremely wary in front of any TV set or PC that has
anything remotely resembling a camera attached to it.

IT IS always good to see a local newspaper reporting science. So
Feedback was pleased to read a story in the Bognor Regis Journal and
Guardian explaining Comet Hale-Bopp. The comet, according to the paper, was
discovered in July 1995 by two amateur astronomers, Alan Hale and Tom Bopp, when
it was “more than 700 miles from the Sun”.

True enough, as far as it goes, though unless Feedback is mistaken the
distance was nearer 700 million miles. Unless Feedback is also mistaken, the
journal will be Patrick Moore’s local newspaper. It would have been amusing to
be a fly on the astronomer’s wall when he read this over his breakfast
cornflakes.

MOORE might also have enjoyed the following. Richard Ogley writes to tell us
that he and Tim Ash share an office and try to study astronomy. One day Tim came
out with this joke, which, for once, we are going to take the risk of claiming
is original.

Two spiral galaxies walk into a pub and one of them goes up to the barman:
“Two pints of lager, please.”